Most of us spend a large part of our work day going from business meeting to another without bothering to assess if we are actually gaining anything out of them. Is there a way to make business meetings more productive?

In order to make the most out of a business meeting you need to improve the productivity of each such meeting. Every meeting should extract the maximum possible for the duration that it lasts. Do not try to make a meeting cover everything under the sun. Instead, try to make sure that the items on the agenda for the particular meeting are covered effectively. At the end of the meeting, the participants should leave knowing the tasks that they need to accomplish.

Here are a few more tips to get the most of out your business meetings.

Business meetings should never be held on an ad hoc basis. You should prepare for a meeting in advance. Start by listing the objectives of the meeting. These objectives need to be clear, specific and measurable. These will help you check if you have covered the meeting goals. You will also waste less time trying to get to the point. List out the expectations or results that you expect from the meeting. During the course of the meeting, encourage the other participants to contribute with their ideas and opinions so that you have their buy-in. The more involved people are, the quicker you will be able to see results. Focus on the bigger issues at hand and do not let tertiary issues take over the meeting. Allow the tone of the meeting to be casual but do not let that make the participants treat the meeting as being frivolous. Leave the jokes for later.

Do not invite people to business meetings unless their presence is required. Just invite those who can actually contribute to the agenda of the meeting. This avoids wasting time for those people who are not really required. Business meetings should be held in a pleasant environment that makes the participants feel relaxed and comfortable. If required, you could rent out an office or conference venue for the meeting so that people have the opportunity to unwind.

Although you have prepared the points that need to be made do not be in a hurry to get to them immediately. Set a steady pace for the meeting and start by making everyone feel comfortable. The tempo should neither be too slow nor too fast.

We will take a look at the agenda for a business meeting. This is the key to an efficient meeting and if badly considered becomes, not only a significant demotivator, but can waste a lot of time.

The meeting agenda:

To start with, you will only need an agenda if a meeting happens. It is simple to begin creating an agenda for a meeting in advance.

The agenda will be circulated at some time to those invited. Mainly for the initial meeting, to fulfill the meeting objectives, make the team as small as required. For regular official meetings the list of attendees should be consistent but could be different for further meetings.

The template:

Many meetings should adhere to a similar style, so employ a template. Features of the agenda might be the following:

Time of the item…

This is the beginning of the agenda item but it may also indicate the duration of the item. This would naturally go into the next item start time. This enables everybody to identify the length of time allotted to the item on the agenda and allows the chairperson to encourage attendees to keep to it.

The time in the agenda should permit an introduction and a review of the discussion at the finish, say 5 minutes in total.

Item title…

It should be included after dialogue and gaining the leader’s (see below) agreement, before producing the agenda. The length of the item should be agreed. Furthermore, the chairperson might ascertain from the leader if there are any expected results that may emerge from the presentation.

Item reason…

This component ought to describe the purpose for incorporating the agenda item and possibly any expected conclusions. This will help concentrate awareness on the major issue and should encourage people to consider it more ahead of the meeting. It enables the chairperson to keep the dialogues on track.

Allowing individuals to reflect more on every item, by illustrating it in this manner, will help to secure added contribution from a broader region than merely from the department of the discussion leader.

The topic leader…

This establishes the person who will guide the discussion of this particular agenda item. The leader has a duty in presenting the argument and defining any conclusion in a summary at the end.

Preparation…

This is an opportunity to determine anything that should be performed before the meeting in support of the agenda item. This is for all attendees and not just for the leader of the dialogue.

Apart from forearming people, and enabling them to effectively contribute in the meeting, it can help to speed up the discussion and thus achieve the outputs for the agenda item more speedily. This can save considerable time and decrease blank and uninterested faces at meetings.

You might want to add additional items to the business meeting agenda apart from the main points for discussion. For example, ‘an introduction’ which could be used to suggest any specific problems but also to reiterate areas of the meeting policy.

You could like to end the meeting with ‘any additional business’. This enables the highlighting of any impromptu concerns but significantly offers a point for the chairperson to thank the attendees for their contribution to the discussions and to agree the date of the next meeting.

Attendee suggestions:

If you must send a replacement, make certain that the chairperson realises it. Offer a justification for your absence and identify any concerns that this action might incur.

If you are unable to turn up, can you present the required data to the chairperson in person? This will guard against using up the time of another person. The chairperson can then introduce the results of the dialogue in the slot for the agenda item.

Make certain that you get a distributed agenda in lots of time to consider additional items in addition to your own.

If you must leave the meeting at a specific time notify the chairperson, who may tell the meeting at the outset, just in case it could influence the presentation of a separate item.

It is just as much the responsibility of the leader of the dialogue to retain focus as the chairperson, particularly when faced with questions that could be wandering from the item purpose. Protracted discussions might be more effectively served by continuing them outside of the meeting.

The leader ought to complete the talk by summing up and spelling out the main points.

When, as an attendee, you are not happy with the format of the meeting, take it up with the chairperson external to the meeting. Don’t disrupt a meeting on a personal campaign.

If you turn up at a meeting go equipped and primed to contribute, and not just on your own agenda topic.

Online meetings are the conferences or meetings that are conducted with the aid of the internet. These meetings can be differentiated into two types they are the casual online meetings and professional business meetings. To conduct the casual online conference, there are various options available on the Internet; they are Google+ Hangouts and Skype. But for professional business meetings, these video chat options do not work out. The business meetings always need a professional web conferencing solution.

Video conferencing solution eases the business executives to interact effectively with one another as if they are meeting in live or in person. This solution enables the users to have interactions with the people who are separated by a thousand miles of distance.

In the recent years, the advancements in the web conferencing technology have renovated the online meetings towards more mobile and flexible. In the preceding years, the conferencing solution was hardware based, where the organizations have to set up a boardroom to conduct the meetings. This setup will be composed of a huge range of hardware components.

Normally the online meetings are conducted to have an interaction with the business executives are far located. Let us consider a case: A business executive is on business tour and he/she must have to attend the meeting. In this situation, such executive cannot search for a boardroom and log on to the meeting. As a solution to this case, video conferencing software can be used. Through the software based application, the business executive doesn’t have to look for a boardroom; rather he/she can log on to the meeting through his/her wireless PC.

During the time of the meeting, the business executives do have a need of presenting some documents. The software video conferencing solutions are integrated with certain fruitful features, by which the online meeting can be more interactive and lively. Whiteboard sharing, file sharing, desktop sharing, referendum, voting and co-browsing are some of the most helpful features for executing the online meetings successfully.

The basic software and hardware requirements needed for making use of the video conferencing software are: standard PC (Laptop, iPad or Android based mobile phone), internet connection either broadband or leased line or a software license to make the application installed in the PC.

Web conferencing software provides ample benefits for the organizations, in terms of minimizing cost of resources. Through this solution the business executive doesn’t have a need to all the way travel from his place to the meeting place. This will cut down certain expenses such as air fares and hotel bills.

Lastly it can be justified that, the video conferencing software is the best loom for executing the online meeting in an effective way.